


Symbolon

by Thea_Bromine



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-02
Updated: 2015-03-02
Packaged: 2018-03-15 23:49:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,264
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3466616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thea_Bromine/pseuds/Thea_Bromine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once upon a time, Giles and Ethan cast a spell. It wasn't much of a spell.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Symbolon

Packing was a bloody nuisance but it had to be done. He had given notice on the flat, and his father had agreed to come in once he had left, to oversee the removal men who would take his furniture and the sealed and labelled boxes to the storage unit he had rented. Various Council stamped crates contained the things that would go to America with him; he had enough sense to pack into them everything that he thought he could possibly do without in the last ten days, so that the suitcases he would have to cope with on the journey would be of manageable size. He had already made two trips to the municipal dump with the pure detritus that he wanted neither to take with him, nor to leave against his return. He was beginning to think that the end was in sight, that one more crate of clothes and books, one more box of handwritten notes, one more bin bag of dead paper and old photographs might finish it.

The shoe box contained... yes, photographs, and letters, and... a feather, a stone, a shell, and a faint smell of laurel leaves and cigarette smoke. The recollection stirred at the back of his mind. That was from the days after Oxford the first time, the days before Eyghon, and he didn’t think about those days any more, except that sometimes he did. Sometimes he did, because remembering those days was how he defined himself now, now that he wasn’t what he had been then. He flicked through the photographs. Randall, Lucy, was it Lucy? Philip. Ethan, of course; there was always Ethan. Morag-and-Will who never showed up apart. Himself staring insolently into the camera, leather jacketed, one knee cocked over the arm of the chair and his hips canted provocatively forward. Here was Ethan again, kneeling on the floor, one hand on the mirror they had taken down from the bathroom, and at the remove of so many years Giles could recognise the longing that he hadn’t seen – or possibly hadn’t allowed himself to see – at the time. He rather suspected that it had been the first time in Ethan’s life that he had failed to get something he wanted, and Giles wondered guiltily if everything that happened afterwards had perhaps been seeded that night. Not that there had been any way of foreseeing it. Not then.

He remembered Ethan shrugging with that wicked grin he turned on so many things. “I’ll just have to convince you that you’re wrong, Ripper.” And then a night, or two nights, or three or five or ten, and it was never mentioned again.

Then there was Eyghon and everything changed.

But that time, that wild, funny, exciting weekend, they hadn’t even been doing anything that the Council couldn’t have winked at under the banner of ‘youthful high spirits’. Everybody knew that unsupervised magic was dangerous, and everybody knew that there were small spells, hedge witch spells, that anybody could do without harm.

They had no reason to believe that it wasn’t one of those. To be honest, most of them had probably not even believed it to be a real spell – just one of those silly things people did at Hallowe’en or May Day, the folk memory of a true spell, like throwing apple peel over your shoulder to demonstrate that your true love’s name began with O or S because no apple peel had ever formed any other letter, or putting a laurel leaf under your pillow to dream of the person you would marry. Not that Ethan would ever do such a thing – whatever else Ethan was, he was _not_ romantic.

Except, the perspective of years told him, that Ethan had already done the spell for himself, and the peculiar emotional and social blindness that he had shown all the time that Giles had known him, had stopped him even imagining that Giles had thought or felt anything that wasn’t what Ethan thought and felt. He had suggested the spell to them all simply to disguise the fact that he wanted Giles to do it, and he wanted Giles to do it to bind him ever closer to Ethan. It had never occurred to Ethan that the result might not be the one he anticipated.

Oh, it was obvious _now_ that it had been Ethan who had guided the conversation to the subject of soulmates, for all that it had been Will who had mentioned them first. Will, it seemed, had heard somewhere – he couldn’t remember where – about a spell to give you the name of the One, your One, the person whose heart would complete your own.

Morag, of course, thought it was romantic. He remembered her as a fluffy airhead, devoted to Will, capable of turning shrill and dangerous in his defence, although apparently unable to defend herself. A sharp word would fill her (rather bovine) eyes with tears; she cried at maudlin songs on the radio, at sad stories or sentimental art. He had thought her a rather stupid woman, but in retrospect, he believed he might have been mistaken: she had watched their first (unsuccessful) attempt at demon-raising in silence, and the next night, she and Will were missing from the group. He had seen them occasionally in the street afterwards; she had smiled and raised a hand in greeting, but her other hand was always entwined in Will’s, and somehow, despite Will’s glances back at Ripper, they never had time to stop and talk. By the time of Eyghon, the rest of the group had stopped even asking after them, and there was no suggestion that they should be invited to the rites. No, if somebody in that group had been stupid, Giles thought wryly, it hadn’t been Morag.

It was Will’s idea; Morag thought it was romantic; Ethan said nothing at all about it, and again, perspective left Giles wondering how he could have missed that. Ethan _never_ had no opinion on any subject. Deidre the realist voiced the objections, not to the spell, but to the practicality of it.

“What if your soulmate isn’t somebody you know? What if he’s, I don’t know, if he’s dead already, or living in China and you never meet, or married to somebody else? What if he’s too old, or too young, or the wrong sex?”

Randall had snorted. “Always the pragmatist, aren’t you, Deed? It’s just a bit of fun. You needn’t stay if you think it’s so stupid. Or if you think it’s dangerous or something...” And so, of course, she had stayed, because the only person worse than Deidre at refusing a dare was Ripper, and everybody knew it.

Ethan knew it, of course. Giles had seen him relax as Randall spoke. He’d had enough Watcher training even at that stage, that he had watched, and seen, but he hadn’t understood. He had missed that Ethan wanted this to happen; even had he recognised that, he thought he wouldn’t have comprehended _why_ Ethan wanted it.

He certainly wouldn’t have grasped why Ethan wanted them to think that it wasn’t Ethan’s idea.

He didn’t remember which of them produced the feather and the shell. Probably Morag: she had a hippyish tendency to weave such things into her hair. He _did_ remember that he – and again with the Watcher training – had been the one who pointed out that the laurel leaves they needed weren’t what his landlady referred to as her laurel hedge: that was a form of evergreen cherry. They needed bay laurel, and Deidre had laughed and fetched a plastic pack of dried, bent bay leaves from the kitchen.

It was a simple spell, and they took it in turn to do it, leaning towards the chipped mirror. They could all see: as each of them in turn tore a bay leaf in half, their own name and another drew themselves in fine black spidery script across the glass, lingered for half a minute, and faded.

Morag’s spell drew Will’s name, to nobody’s surprise; Will’s in turn drew hers, and it was only as it dissipated that it occurred to Ripper to wonder what they would have said or done had it not. Lucy’s spell produced a name none of them could even pronounce: Irish from the look of it. Randall’s spell... produced no name at all other than his own.

Giles tried not to wonder about that.

They all laughed at the sight of Deidre’s name, because Deidre had been saying for most of a year that she disliked Steven. Philip’s spell brought up two names: a girl they knew and a man they didn’t, and when Philip blushed and stammered, the three names ran into each other, twisting like snakes. Both Paula’s and Sam’s spells came up with names that the casters claimed not to know.

Ethan held out his hand for the bay leaves; his eyes fixed on the glass. He made more of the incantation than any of the rest of them had done, allowing the syllables to roll around the room, and his gestures were wide and expansive. There had been a faint smile on his lips as the letters of his own name had formed, and it had turned to a smirk as they could all see Ripper’s full name sketch itself in underneath. Randall had sniggered, whether at Ethan or at Ripper, Giles didn’t know. He had felt the jolt of shock in his chest: he had known that he was Ethan’s bed-partner of choice, but the notion that there was more to it than that...

He had jumped when Deidre had pushed the bay leaf into his hand; his ears and throat had still been burning when he spoke the spell, and his voice hadn’t been perfectly steady. If it had been possible to get out of it, he would have done, he thought. Even as the leaf crumbled between his fingers, he was aware that this couldn’t end well.

There was a silence, and then Ethan’s voice, cooler than he had expected, and less emotional than he might have feared. “Who’s that, Ripper?”

He had shaken his head, wordless, staring at the letters on the glass, hiding his relief that the name wasn’t Ethan’s and at the same time feeling a faint resentment. Something in him _had_ been aware, although it was only now that he acknowledged it, that Ethan had manipulated them all simply to have Ripper cast this spell. The point of it was to have had Ripper marked as Ethan’s, and it had never crossed Ethan’s mind that it might not be so. It wasn’t just resentment, either: there was the first hint of discomfort. The others wouldn’t let it pass, he knew. Ethan was admired, followed, acknowledged to be their leader. He wasn’t – always – liked. Ripper knew that Ethan was aware of it; he knew that Ethan was more careful than he appeared to be to avoid giving the others anything on which to hang an assault on his leadership – any weakness like unrequited love.

Somehow, yes, that had been when Ethan had said it, recovering the situation. He had insinuated himself into Ripper’s lap, pinning him to the chair, and purred into his ear, “I’ll just have to convince you that you’re wrong.” They had all laughed, rather uneasily, and there had been vodka, and cigarettes, and the _other_ sort of cigarettes, and he rather thought that the mirror had been showing another crack when Philip put it back on the bathroom wall.

He hadn’t thought of it all in years, and there was no need to think of it again. It was all nonsense anyway. It wasn’t as if he believed, not really, that anybody had a soulmate. He had never met the person who was supposed to be his One, and he had long since stopped expecting that he would. Randall was dead, and Ethan was gone, and the others had... he didn’t know what had happened to them. The one who was gone was Ripper, he supposed, rather than any of _them_.

He tipped the contents of the box into a black plastic bin bag, flattened the cardboard, and reached for a file of bank statements.

* * * * *

The first few days in the school were... trying. His Slayer was not at all what he had been led to expect: she didn’t seem keen on listening to him, she appeared to know _nothing_ from the Handbook, she was much less academic than he had been led to believe, and she kept talking about a tall dark stranger. For some reason she wanted to involve her friends in the slaying – how could she call them friends when she had only known them five minutes? – and his objections were being overruled without her even giving them (giving _him_ ) serious consideration. Add in the complications of being in a foreign country where some things were completely familiar and others were incomprehensibly different, and the terrors of a Hellmouth, and it was hardly surprising that he wasn’t yet firing on all cylinders.

“I, I do apologise,” he said formally to the dark-haired boy who was looking nervously from him to the Slayer, and to the intelligent girl (Willow? Who named their children after trees?) who seemed to have some idea of how to research. “I, I’m sure I’ve been told and simply forgotten, but I don’t believe I know your name?”

The boy dipped his head shyly. “Xander. Xander Harris.” He glanced up and clarified. “Alexander Harris.”

Ripper gasped, and Giles dropped his tea cup.


End file.
